On this date in 1858, Isaac Hecker (1819-1888) and three companions founded the Congregation of Missionary Priests of Saint Paul the Apostle, known commonly as The Paulist Fathers. All four were converts to Roman Catholicism, who had subsequently become Redemptorist priests and had participated in parish missions. The Redemptorists (the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemeer) had been founded by Saint Alphonsus Liguori in the kingdom of Naples in 1732, originally in order to do missionary work among the neglected poor who had become marginalized from the mainstream life of the Church. In the mid-19th-century United State, the Redemptorists ministered mainly to German-speaking immigrants. As natural born American citizens and Catholic converts, Hecker and his colleagues, Augustine Hewit, George Deshon, and Francis Baker had expanded their missionary activity to native-born English speakers, non-Catholic a well as Catholic. Dispensed from their Redemptorist vows in March 1858, they founded the Paulist Fathers on this date in 1858 in order to continue their work of American evangelization.
A central aspect of Isaac Hecker's own religious journey to Catholicism, which would inspire his missionary efforts first as a Redemptiorist and then as a Paulist, was his personal conviction that Roman Catholicsm was the answer both to everyone's Questions of the Soul and Aspirations of Nature (the titles of his 1955 and 1857 books) and also, more broadly, the solution to social and political polarization in U.S. culture. Thus, in his first audience with Blessed Pope Pius IX in 1857, Hecker assured the Pope that "the Catholic truth ... once known would ... act like oil on troubled waters" to overcome political polarization and "sustain our institutions and enable our young country to realize its great destiny" [Letter from Rome, December 22, 1857].
At that time, such sentiments could only appear aspirational. Hecker's insights were in fact quite culturally counter-intuitive, as indeed he had considered his own personal journey to Catholicism.
Hecker himself claimed to have had no formal religious affiliation prior to his conversion to Catholicism in 1844, a situation he saw as itself symptomatic of the fluid state of American religiosity at that time. Actually, thanks to the Second Great Awakening, the U.S. was becoming a much more religious country, what G.K. Chesterton would later famously call "a country with the soul of a church." That said, Hecker's initial interests had been more in the area of political reformism. Gradually, however, his priorities had evolved from political to social to religious concerns. The former were never completely forgotten, but the latter definitely took precedence. Like Saint Augustine in the fourth century, Hecker took time, sampling as many as possible of the leading contemporary religious ideas and trends, until finally finding his spiritual home, where he had least expected, writing in his Diary, "I have not wished to make myself catholic but it answers to the wants of my soul."
As a priest, Hecker's priorities were primarily pastoral and missionary work, pioneering in person and in print a renewed missionary commitment to his unique time and place, the still young mid-19th-century American republic. He was confidently convinced that the same Holy Spirit who spoke in human hearts simultaneously spoke with authority through the Church, and that therefore the active evangelization of American society would ultimately benefit both the Church and civil society.
This was, as already stated, culturally counter-intuitive, at a time when the Church in Europe was still recovering from the destructive ideas of the Enlightenment and the destructive politics of the French Revolution and its aftermath. Surprisingly, however, Hecker was not alone in appreciating an alternative set of possibilities for Catholicism in the United States. The most famous observer of early 19th-century American society and institutions, the French nobleman Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859), also appreciated the fundamentally fragmented character of modern democratic society with its fragile connections among citizens and the dilemma of how to create an authentic community capable of uniting such citizens consistent with liberal democratic institutions. Already, however, in the 1830s, de Tocqueville had discovered American democracy's utterly unexpected compatibility with Catholicism.
At a time when the Church in Europe was struggling to survive as an institution against an increasingly secular liberal political order that sought to constrain it, the Church sought to counteract the social fragmentation associated with secular liberalism and democracy and to reconnect increasingly isolated individuals by repairing and restoring traditional religious bonds. This commonly found expression in efforts to re-secure traditional political arrangements (e.g., the. union of throne and altar). Hecker's American alternative enthusiastically supported the Church's spiritual authority over its members, but envisaged a social solution in which citizens, converted to Catholicism as the answer to their deepest human aspirations, would be empowered to influence the development of society. His was a thoroughly religious form of discourse, uniquely adapted to addressing social and political concerns, combining Catholic universalism and a distinctly American self-understanding of the relationship between religion and society in a providential perspective, which could re-engage with the framework bequeathed by Lockean liberalism. His was less a political solution to the problems posed by liberal individualism, but a social solution to the underlying religious problem that he believed afflicted classical liberalism.
Whereas, for Hecker's famous contemporary Karl Marx (1818-1883), religion meant alienation and its survival in society showed the inadequacy of its purely political separation from the modern state, for Hecker Roman Catholicism was the overcoming of alienation through the providential fulfillment of the authentic aspirations of human nature. And its power to transform society through the conversion of citizens more than compensated for the Church's loss of political power.
Of course, much of what Hecker had observed in and admired about America, including the egalitarianism and sociability which had also struck a secular observer like de Tocquevlle, no longer characterizes the post-industrial, late capitalist, centralized state which the United States has since become. The American he aspired to evangelize is gone forever. Likewise, American Catholicism - the religious remedy he posted for the social fragmentation and political polarization the United States experienced (and still experiences) - has changed as well. While the individual conversions which were so central to the practical implementation of Hecker's program have never occurred in the numbers necessary to make the kind of social impact Hecker had hoped for, what did make an impact (then and now) has been immigration. Indeed, Hecker's spiritually mature thinking in The Church and the Age did at last incorporate immigration into his providential vision for America.
With immigration again curtailed, however, U.S. Catholicism will once more change its face. In a secularizing society which increasingly resembles religiously the United States that preceded the Great Awakening (minus that period's egalitarianism and aspirational politics), what is left of Hecker's Catholic vision for America? While conversions continue, of course, the most public and apparently influential conversions may actually be contributing to the our cultural division and political polarization within both the Church and society, the opposite of how Hecker had imagined that both would develop.
Absent Catholic immigration and given the increasingly polarization within the U.S. Catholic Church itself, Hecker's Catholic vision for America may depend more and more on another important aspect of Hecker's program.
Already as a Redemptorist missionary priest, Hecker had recognized the need, in a famous 1851 letter to Orestes Brownson, for what he called "a higher tone of catholic life in our country," without which "we shall do nothing." Hecker understood, early on, that for Catholicism to solve the problem of America, American Catholicism had first to get its own. house in order, so to speak. Hence, any successful evangelizing ministry must first presuppose an effective mission and ministry addressing the divisions within the Catholic community.
"The Catholic faith alone," Hecker wrote to Brownson in that same 1851 letter, "is capable of giving to people a true permanent [and] burning enthusiasm frought [sic] with the greatest of deeds. But to enkindle this in others we must be possessed of it first ourselves." [Letter to Brownson, Septmber 5, 1851].
No comments:
Post a Comment